The Colonial Constitution
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05 Jan
2024
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Community Engagement
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Various Scholars
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In December 1946, a diverse bunch of battle-weary Indian nationalists who had spent long years struggling for freedom against the British took up the challenge of a lifetime: drafting the constitution of a soon to be independent India. But, curiously, the document they produced seemed divorced from their own experience as freedom fighters.
While during the freedom movement, the Government of India Act 1935 had been reviled as a 'charter of slavery', now more than a third of the Constitution was directly borrowed from that hated law. While many members of the Constituent Assembly had personally experienced the brutality of preventive detention and the law against sedition, the Assembly didn't outlaw either. While Gandhiji had talked about keeping sovereign power close to the people by vesting a large part of it in the gram panchayat, the Constitution gave Indians a powerful. remote Union government 'perched on Mt Everest' that towered over the people like an imperial lord. Though citizens had some important fundamental rights, the government could suspend these rights at will using its wide emergency powers, wider than even what the British had when they left India. What we got then was a colonial constitution that fundamentally did not trust its own people.
In this brilliantly argued and profound book, the scholar Arghya Sengupta shows us how we got here. Neither a critique nor a celebration, this is an origin story. It is a meditation on the nature of constitution making and of moments of great change. An instant classic, The Colonial Constitution is the perfect antidote to the gushing accounts of the Constitution that abound. In the end, this book raises an unsettling question: does India need a new constitution?
Duration -
January 5, 2024
Timing: Tea: 6:00 PM | Discussion: 6:30 - 8:30 pm IST
Registrations Closed
Arghya Sengupta
Arghya Sengupta was born in Kolkata in 1984. He was educated at St. Xavier’s Collegiate School, Kolkata, the National Law School of India University Bengaluru and the University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar and Lecturer in Law. He is currently the Research Director of the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy which he founded in 2013. He is the author of two acclaimed books Independence and Accountability of the Indian Higher Judiciary which he released in Mumbai in Jnanapravaha and HamīñAst? A Biography of Article 370(co-authored). He is a columnist at The Times of India and The Telegraph.
Faisal Devji
Dr Faisal Devji is University Reader in Modern South Asian History at the University of Oxford. He is the Director of the Asian Studies Centre. He has held faculty positions at the New School in New York, Yale University and the University of Chicago, from where he also received his PhD in Intellectual History. He is a Fellow at New York University’s Institute of Public Knowledge, and was Yves Otramane Chair at the Graduate Institute in Geneva. Dr Devji is the author of four books, the latest being 'Muslim Zion: Pakistan as a Political Idea' (2013). He is interested in Indian political thought as well as that of modern Islam. Devji’s broader concerns have to do with ethics and violence in a globalized world.
Justice Gautam Shirish Patel
Justice Gautam Shirish Patel is a graduate of St. Xavier's College and Government Law College. He started practice in 1987 in Mumbai, working on commercial, corporate and civil litigations and also appearing in a large number of environmental public interest litigations including those relating to the Sanjay Gandhi National Park, protection of mangroves, town and country planning issues, Melghat National Park, the Mill Lands, protection of open spaces, etc.
In 1994-1995, Mr. Justice Patel received the First international Fellowship at Pacific Energy & Resources Center, Sausalito, California in environmental law. This included course work at the University of Berkeley's Boalt Hall School of Law and an internship with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund.
He served as the Honorary Secretary of the Bombay Bar Association for two three-year terms from 1999 to 2005 and served on the Association's Standing Committee till his appointment as a High Court judge.
Rajdeep Sardesai
Rajdeep Sardesai is a senior journalist and author of the best-selling book, '2014: The Election that Changed India'. With 26 years of journalistic experience in print and TV, Sardesai was managing editor of the NDTV network before he set up the IBN 18 network with channels like CNN IBN as founder editor. He began his career with the Times of India and was the city editor of its Mumbai edition at the age of 26. He is presently a consulting editor with the India Today Group and anchors a prime time show on India Today.
Specialising in national politics, Sardesai has won numerous awards for journalistic excellence including the prestigious Padma Shri for Journalism in 2008, the International Broadcasters Award for coverage of the 2002 Gujarat riots, and the Ramnath Goenka Excellence in Journalism Award for 2007. He has also won the Asian Television Awards 2014 for Best News Presenter in Asia for the coverage of the 2014 general elections. He has been News Anchor of the Year at the Indian Television Academy for eight of the last ten years and his programme Big Fight won the Asian TV award for best talk show twice in a row. He has been the President of the Editors Guild of India and was also chosen as a Global Leader for Tomorrow by the World Economic Forum in 2000. Sardesai writes a fortnightly column across several newspapers, including the Hindustan Times.